LoyalsClub: a multi-business loyalty platform built and launched from Dubai

The situation

Service businesses in the UAE, salons, barbershops, clinics, run on repeat customers, but most of them have no real way to know who is repeating. The booking calendar and the POS system both forget a client the second they walk out. We decided to build our own answer to that, sized for the business that owns one to ten branches and does not have a CTO, a data team, or the patience for a six-month rollout.

That meant an unusually wide brief for a single product: a backend that could run subscriptions and reward rules safely, a phone app people would actually keep on their home screen, a staff scanner simple enough to use one-handed at a busy counter, and an owner dashboard that answers the only question that matters, "did this cost me money or make me money."

What we built

The backend is a .NET 10 API on PostgreSQL, deployed with Terraform and Terragrunt onto AWS in the UAE region, because a UAE business asking where its data lives deserves a straight answer. Stripe handles subscriptions and billing. Firebase and AWS SES push notifications and email. On top of that sit two Flutter apps, one for customers, one for staff running the scanner at the counter, and a Nuxt owner portal with the reporting a business owner opens on a Tuesday morning to see how the week went.

No agency layer, no handoff between "the strategy people" and "the build people." The same team that designed the reward rules wrote the migration that enforces them.

How it went

Our first real customer, a Dubai barbershop, went live on 2 May 2026. Over the following period, to 13 August 2026, the numbers told a story we did not have to dress up: 70 customers enrolled, 107 scanned visits, and AED 31,936 in tracked spend. The part worth screenshotting is this: the 30% of customers who came back at least once were worth 2.4 times as much over their lifetime as the ones who visited once, and that minority produced 51% of all tracked revenue. That is the entire argument for loyalty software in one sentence, proven on one shop's own ledger, not a vendor's slide deck.

That barbershop has since stopped actively using the platform, though the subscription is retained. We are early. Single-digit paying customers is the honest number, and we would rather say that than imply a queue of clients we do not have.

What we would do differently

We would have started collecting owner-side feedback loops earlier. That barbershop made an unprompted promo video for us, which told us the product landed emotionally before we had the instrumentation to know why. Building your own product means you cannot blame the client's scope for a slow rollout. It is a useful kind of honesty to sit with.